Tobold's Blog
Thursday, March 16, 2006
 
Raid hardware

I've been discussing a lot recently the theory that Blizzard is catering to a small minority of the 3.6% of characters participating in high-end raids. So I was talking about this with some friends, some of which *are* hardcore raiders, and one of them had his own theory why this would be so: Blizzard doesn't want the bulk of the players to be able to access Molten Core / Blackwing Lair / etc. because their hardware couldn't support it.

I only have anecdotal evidence to that effect, but evidence it is: I'm on a shared chat channel with an allied guild, and Sunday suddenly my chat was swamped with "xxx is leaving the chat channel" messages. Turned out that they were all in Molten Core, and right in the middle of their raid, the Molten Core server crashed. Much anger afterwards, because the server reset, respawning all the mobs, everybody who logged back on got killed immediately, and they had to restart the raid from the beginning.

Second anecdote on raid hardware is from a friend, whose guild is at the point where they can "farm" Onyxia, and get until Ragnaros in MC, so they did their first raid into BWL. Turns out that another guild was in BWL too, at the same time, and when my friend's guild entered the dungeon, the latency shot up for the guild that was already there. That resulted in a shouting match on the BWL general chat channel, along the lines of "this dungeon can't be raided by two guilds at once, and we were here first" - "Oh yes? And how do you want to make us leave?", and ended up with both guilds getting wiped due to lag problems.

Before I wasn't even aware that each of these raid dungeons is running on a separate server. But if MC can crash without the rest of the world crashing, that must be the case. I don't know if BWL really only supports one raid at a time, or whether my friend's Horde guild simply couldn't see the couple of Alliance guilds already in BWL, but it seems that at some number of people entering the dungeon the lag increases for everybody. And the MC crash was also probably caused by overpopulation.

So unless Blizzard is upgrading their raid dungeon server hardware, it is unlikely that we will reach a point where more than a tiny percentage of people can go raiding at the same time. If Blizzard is creating other ways to gain epics, while blocking the traditional ways of guilds to learn raiding in smaller raids and progress to MC and BWL, it might be because they don't want too many people in these raid dungeons, due to hardware issues.
Comments:
The MC crash you mentioned in your post could be an server wide instances crash. I was in Dire Maul just finishing the tribute run when all instances crashed before we could loot the tributes. We got dumped to Stonetalon Mountains and fell to our deaths.

When I got back to Orgrimmar, I heard another guild which had killed Magdamar and instances crashed before they could loot.
 
That resulted in a shouting match on the BWL general chat channel, along the lines of "this dungeon can't be raided by two guilds at once, and we were here first"

This brings back warm and fuzzy memories. ;)

"Kingroom is camped!"
"Yeah but by me."
"We will see."
"Choo, Choo, Chooooo"

I thought all of the instances are handled by one seperate instance server(cluster) wich handles all intances for a couple of world servers.? We never had any problems like this, although there are lots and lots of MC/BWL guilds playing side by side.
 
Last Friday, a friend's MC raid crashed while mine did not. There were at least 3 full raids in MC on my server at the time (again, with only 1 of them crashing).

I've also seen DM crash (with me in it) without any simultaneous crash of other instances.

I have no idea how any of this works. All I know is that Kalimdor & EK are on separate servers since each can crash separately (and used to do so regularly, back long ago).
 
Lots of DM crashing since AQ opened up. It has become almost unplayable on Azjol-Noob.

"Sure, we at Blizzard want your $15 per month, but due to crappy hardware, game design issues and bugs, you will be limited to Waling Caverns and Ragefire Chasm until Patch 1.17".

Lawlz.
 
I keep forgetting that hardware issues vary a lot over the different servers. Although my server, EURO Runetotem, is labelled as "full", I haven't had a server crash for months, except for the opening of the AQ gates.

But I know that some US servers are still crashing regularly, while other US servers are as stable as the European ones. Hmmm, I should write another blog entry on the ties that bind us to crappy hardware, when we could just switch to another server and have no more problems. But the time we "invested" in our characters and the friends we made rules that out.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool